“It was a different kind of experience for me,” Cukor said of Bhowani Junction, his adaption of John Masters’ 1954 novel about an Anglo-Indian woman torn between lovers and national allegiances in the midst of de-colonization. “It excited me—and then we had a bad preview.” The film was bluntly re-cut, Ava Gardner’s volatile heroine tamed, and the film’s central political conflict muffled—but what remains is still one of Cukor’s most daring and personal films: an acute portrait of a nation in turmoil, and a pointed statement on Britain’s legacy of oppression.